The Sun, and how it was made by Divine Will. This story is of literary and ancient origin; the language is very antique.
Svyatogór. Svyatogór in this story may be eponymous of geography. The word standing for svyátyya góry, the sacred mountains. Múrom is an ancient Russian settlement in the province of Vladímir, by the river Oka, and the village of Karacharovo is not far off.
As to Svyatogór’s bride, there is another story which tells how he acquired her. One day Svyatogór was walking on the earth and laid hold of a wallet which an old man whom he met wandering by held. He could not lift it however, for it was rooted in the earth. He went on from there to a smith, something like Wayland Smith (the whole tale has a curious Norse tang), who forged his fortune, told him he would have to go to the Kingdom by the Sea, and there he would find his wife who for thirty years had been lying in the dung. He proceeds to the Kingdom by the Sea, finds the miserable hut, enters it, and sees the maiden lying in the dung. And her body was as dark as a pine. So Svyatogór purchases her freedom by taking out five hundred roubles, laying it on the table, and then snatching up his sharp sword out of his sheath smote her on her white breasts and so left her. Then the maiden woke up, and the skin of age-long filth had been broken; she went and traded with the five hundred roubles, came to the Holy Mountains, and presented herself there in all her maiden beauty. Svyatogór the Knight also came to look on her, fell in love and wooed her for his wife. He then recognised her by the scar on her white breasts.
The Swan Maiden. This is one of the most baffling figures in Russian mythology. She corresponds to the Siren of Greece, and the Lorelei of Germany, but is very distinct in all her characteristics. She is also called in the Russian Devítsa (maiden), which may be a corruption of Dívitsa, the feminine of Div, one of the ancient pagan deities of Russia. Like the Lorelei, she is said to sit on the rocks and draw sailors down into the depths, but her more human characteristics are stated in this story.
Thoughtless Word. The devil in this story is the popular myth of the water-gods or sprites, elsewhere called the vodyanóy or vódyánik. The point of detail, that after the rescue of the maiden the boy has to walk backwards until he reaches the high road, is rather similar to the Celtic notion of Widdershins, the superstition that anyone who walked round the churchyard contrary to the direction of the sun would be captured by the fairies.
Túgarin Zmyéyevich. Túgarin Zmyéyevich, the strong man, the Serpent’s Son.
Vazúza and Vólga. Similar stories are told of other rivers. The old Russian ballads give names and patronymics to their rivers such as the people use for themselves, e.g. Dněpr Slovútich Don Iványch.
The Vazúza is a short stream crossing the borders of the provinces of Tver and Smolensk, meeting a great bend of the Vólga at Zubtsóv (in the province of Tver).
The Sea of Khvalýnsk is the Caspian, so called from an ancient people (the Khvalísi) of the eleventh and tenth centuries, who lived at the mouth of the Vólga in the Caspian. There is also a town called Khvalýnsk on the Vólga in the province of Sarátov, above the city of Sarátov.
This particular story is probably a poetization of a geographical fact, but in all the Russian folk-lore the river-gods play a very great part. Thus Igor in The Word of Igor’s Armament, on the occasion of his defeat, has a very beautiful colloquy with the Donéts. At least two of the heroes of the ballad cycle, Don Ivánovich and Sukhán Odikhmántevich, are in some aspects direct personifications of the rivers, whilst the river-gods exercise a direct and vital influence over the fortunes of several others, such as Vasíli Buslávich and Dobrýnya Nikítich.